- War profiteers in Iraq pursue quick fixes and high profits
by overcharging for shoddy work, while Iraqis protest that they could do
the work better and cheaper. Welcome to the reconstruction racket.
-
- The giant steam turbine at the Najibiya power plant is
quiet. If the Russian engineers who built the original equipment over 30
years ago stopped by to take a look, they might have a hard time recognizing
the machinery: over the years Iraqi engineers have replaced many of the
original blue parts with a patchwork of white and grey makeshift materials.
-
- Across the street the lights go out. Yaruub Jasim, the
general director of electricity for the southern region, a kindly-looking
man in his sixties dressed neatly in a grey suit, is apologetic. "Normally
we have power 23 hours a day but today there is a problem. We should have
done maintenance on these turbines in October, but we had no spare parts
and no money."
-
- The needed parts were supposed to be supplied by Bechtel,
a California-based company in charge of repairing the power system under
a contract to restore Iraq 's infrastructure. The contract was issued without
competing bids last April, before an end to major conflict was declared
by President Bush, and also covers sewage, water and school systems. The
contract is worth over a billion dollars and growing, making Bechtel's
business in Iraq second only to Texas-based Halliburton.
-
- Just days before our visit in mid-December, the United
States government announced its decision to exclude the countries who opposed
the war from winning reconstruction contracts in Iraq. The political ramifications
of this ban, and whether it would cover parts suppliers and sub-contractors
or not, weighs heavily on Jasim's mind.
-
- "Three out of four of our power stations were built
in Russia, Germany, and France. Unfortunately, Mr Bush prevented the French,
Russian, and German companies from [getting contracts in] Iraq three days
ago," he says.
-
- As we walk around the power plant, we notice four brand-new
industrial-sized York air-conditioners. "We got those air conditioners
two weeks ago. Bechtel sent them to us because our equipment was malfunctioning
over the summer, but they haven't installed them and we don't need them
in the winter," says Hamad Salem, the plant's manager. The delay is
due to a dispute over whether Bechtel or the power plant itself is responsible
for installing the air conditioners.
-
- WHO HAS THE POWER?
-
- The engineers in southern Iraq are lucky to only have
to explain why the power fails once a day. Their colleague in Baghdad,
Mohsen Hassan, the technical director for power generation at the ministry
of electricity, has to explain to visitors why there is no power, frequently
for over ten hours a day, in the capital city which houses a quarter of
Iraq's population.
-
- A quiet, unassuming man, Hassan wears a checked shirt,
no tie, and a brown jacket that might be seen on any street in this city.
-
- "Bechtel has put us in a very difficult position.
My minister has said to them if the people get angry, don't blame us. You
know electricity is the first (biggest) problem in Iraq, they must solve
this as soon as possible. Under Saddam we fixed everything quickly but
we didn't worry about quality. We didn't work the standard way, it was
very irregular."
-
- "The Americans have very high standards, ours are
very low," he adds, holding out his hands and bringing them closer
together to illustrate his point. "We need to meet in between."
We ask him why Bechtel is so slow, as surely this is a company that is
very capable, having built the Saudi Arabian electricity system from scratch.
"These are unusual circumstances," says Hassan. "No security,
there is sabotage, the system is upset."
-
- One of the reasons that Bechtel has taken so long is
because its electrical team spent two months simply examining power plants,
substations, and high-voltage lines before they started any work, infuriating
the Iraqi staff, who say they could have told the company what was necessary.
Theft and sabotage has been another problem - as soon as Bechtel started
replacing 10 sabotaged electrical towers near Nassiriya, another 10 were
destroyed nearby.
-
- Bechtel denies responsibility for the situation. "A
lot of people thought the United States was going to come in with a dump
truck of money," Cliff Mumm, head of Bechtel's Iraq effort, recently
told the San Francisco Chronicle. "To just walk in and start fixing
Iraq - that's an unrealistic expectation."
-
- This reasoning is echoed by U.S. government officials.
On a visit to the U.S. Agency for International Development office in the
heavily guarded Baghdad convention center next to the Republican Palace,
we encounter three Secret Service officers with assault rifles in the central
atrium, walking in step, facing different directions, scanning the area
constantly. In the center of the imaginary circle they create is an older
man in a blazer. He looks like a career politician, and smiles as he chats
to the woman walking beside him.
-
- "This looks so splendid," he proclaims, gesturing
at the convention center. We ask the Secret Service guy who he is, perhaps
a member of Congress? "No, he's Ambassador Ted Morse, who runs Baghdad
and its suburbs." I step up and ask him if he will speak to me for
a few minutes about the infrastructure problems in the city. He smiles
genially. "Of course."
-
- Morse focuses relentlessly on the positive. "When
we came here, the entire city was still without light. The entire city
was insecure and there was fighting going on. But now, in terms of the
whole city, there has been tremendous, tremendous progress."
-
- When we tell him that we have talked to the power plant
managers, and they have a different story to tell, he insists that everything
will be resolved in time. "Six months is a little unrealistic to ask
for it [reconstruction] to be over. The bottleneck is sheer time. If you
look at how much time it took to rebuild Bosnia, in Sierra Leone, in Rwanda,
in Cambodia, in Burundi, in Timor. Wherever you have had a true conflict
situation, there is an impatience in that people think it could be done
immediately. Never in the world can it be done immediately. It cannot.
It's just a physical engineering constraint and it has nothing to do with
Bechtel."
-
- Mohsen Hassan tells a different story. "We, the
Iraqi engineers, can repair anything," he says. "But we need
money and spare parts and so far Bechtel has provided us with neither.
The only thing that the company has given us so far is promises. We have
brought the power generation up to 400 megawatts without any spare parts,
but we will need something more than words if we want to provide this city
with the 2,800 megawatts that it demands."
-
- Iraqis point out that the previous regime got things
up and running again after the first Gulf war in a matter of months, even
though the damage was much more extensive because the United States and
Britain deliberately bombed the power infrastructure. This time the invasion
avoided targeting power plants, but more than twelve years of United Nations
sanctions have taken their toll.
-
- The complaints are not limited to electricity. Telephones
don't work because U.S. and British planes bombed many of the exchanges,
and to date Bechtel has yet to repair them. And the water system is also
in a state of major disrepair, according to Sa'ad Mohammed, the director
general of the water department for Baghdad.
-
- "From the beginning, the U.S. considered Iraq like
Afghanistan - without infrastructure and expertise," he told us.
"But when they came here, they realized the Iraqis are very different.
The biggest problem is that the money allocated for water and sewage from
the $18 billion US budget is not enough." he told us.
-
- Yet activists have long warned that the twelve-plus years
of United Nations sanctions had severely impacted utilities because it
was practically impossible to buy spare parts. A report by the New York-based
Global Policy Forum in August 2001 states: "Civilian infrastructure
has suffered disproportionately from the lack of maintenance and investment.
For example, Iraq's electrical sector is barely holding production steady
at one-third of its 1990 capacity even though government expenditure in
the sector consistently exceeds plans. Electrical shortages, worst during
the hot summers, spoil food and medicine and stop water purification, sewage
treatment, and irrigated agriculture, interfering with all aspects of life."
-
- SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN
-
- The situation in Iraq's schools - which Bechtel was supposed
to have repaired over the summer - is not much better. Complaints about
shoddy or undone school repairs have recently brought high-level outside
scrutiny. An internal study by U.S. Army personnel, surveying Iraqi education
ministry staff and school principals and recently leaked to Cox Newspapers,
strongly criticized Bechtel's attempts to renovate Iraqi schools.
-
- "The new fans are cheap and burned out immediately
upon use. All inspected were already broken," wrote a U.S. soldier.
"Lousy paint job. Major clean-up work required. Bathrooms in poor
condition," wrote another about a different school.
-
- Much of the criticism focuses on Bechtel's Iraqi subcontractors.
"The contractor has demanded the schools managers to hand over the
good and broken furniture. The names of the subcontractors are unknown
to us because they did not come to our office," wrote an Iraqi school
planner.
-
- "In almost every case, the paint jobs were done
in a hurry, causing more damage to the appearance of the school than in
terms of providing a finish that will protect the structure. In one case,
the paint job actually damaged critical lab equipment, making it unusable."
-
- Bechtel officials defend their work. "The people
at Bechtel really care about this one. We've all got kids. We've all been
to school. In a country with a lot of hurt, this is meaningful. So, it's
a system, it's people who care and it's being done in the middle of chaos,
chaos evolving into something more orderly and more Iraqi," Bechtel's
Gregory Huger, a manager in the reconstruction program, told a Cox reporter.
-
- To find out for ourselves, we visit four Baghdad schools
(all listed as renovated by Bechtel), beginning with Al-Harthia, a low
white building that houses 570 elementary school students. Here we meet
Huda Sabah Abdurasiq, who loses no time in showing us all that is wrong.
The rain leaks through the ceiling, shorting out the power. The new paint
is peeling and the floor has not been completely repaired, she says.
-
- Most shocking to Huda is the price tag: "I could
fix everything here for just $1,000. Mr. Jeff [a Bechtel sub-contractor]
spent $20,000!" she fumes. She went to the district council and complained
and then marched off to the convention center to confront the military.
"They were very angry and spoke to our councilmember Hassan but nothing
happened. And we have no receipts for money spent. It's useless, they won't
do a thing," she says.
-
- We head over to Al-Wathba school, easily in the worst
condition of all the schools we visit. Ahmad Abdu-satar, a friendly man
in a dapper suit who has worked here for two years, shows us the toilets
and sinks: new brass taps and doors painted a dark blue but the sinks are
in a terrible state, they don't look like they have been touched in a decade.
There is no new paint on any of the walls, and, like the previous school,
the playground is flooded.
-
- "I've been thinking of turning it into a swimming
pool," he remarks sarcastically. "Honestly, nothing has changed
since Saddam's time. I ask you, would American children use these toilets?"
We tell him that budgets have been slashed in America and teachers fired
en masse, but he repeats his question: "I ask you, would American
children use these toilets?" We are forced to concede that the answer
is no.
-
- "We have no books, no stationary, nothing. At least
we had that in Saddam's time. Yes, our salaries have gone up, but so have
prices. When I asked the contractor why they didn't finish the job, they
said: we don't work for you, we work for the Americans."
-
- We stop briefly at the Al Raja'a school, but it is still
being repaired. Jamal Salih, the guard, shows us around, then complains
that he had asked the contractor to fix his house, but they refused. We
take a peek inside, surprising his two daughters and wife who are busy
preparing a meal of potato chips for lunch. The workers also invite us
to join them for their falafel lunch, but we decline and hasten to the
last stop of the day before the school closes at one p.m.
-
- This is Hawa school, run by Batool Mahdi Hussain. Hussain
is a tall woman, dressed all in brown, including her traditional Islamic
headscarf. She appears young for the 11 years she has spent at this school,
which she recently took over when the parents voted her in as headmistress
after the war. Like the two previous headmistresses, she is eager to talk
and show us around.
-
- She is also bitter about the contractors. The school
has a fresh coat of paint on the outside with all of the characters from
the Disney version of Aladdin, complete with the genie and the prince.
-
- But, she says, things are worse than under Saddam. "UNICEF
painted our walls and gave us new Japanese fans. They painted the cartoons
outside. When the American contractors came, they took away our Japanese
fans and replaced them with Syrian fans that don't work," she says
angrily.
-
- We are joined by the school guard, Ali Sekran, who speaks
a few words of English. He repeatedly uses his AK-47 as a pointer to help
Hussain illustrate all the problems. We pray that the gun isn't loaded.
-
- The headmistress takes us to the toilets where a new
water system has been installed, pipes, taps and a motor to pump the water.
The problem is the motor doesn't work so the toilets reek with unflushed
sewage. She then uncovers a new drain cover to show us that it is nothing
but a cover. She walks quickly, not waiting for the camera to catch up,
a whirlwind of show-and-tell. "These doors, the hinges are broken.
We were supposed to get steel doors, we got wooden doors. The new paint
is peeling off. There isn't enough power to run our school."
-
- We notice a brand new blackboard. Hussain says that the
teachers paid for it out of their own pocket. As we bid farewell, she walks
us out of the gate and points to the construction debris in the road.
-
- "They didn't even take their rubbish with them.
They gave us no papers to tell us what they had done and what they did
not do. We had to pay to haul the trash. Honestly, the condition of our
school was better before the contractors came."
-
- Bechtel Baghdad spokesman Francis Canavan says the company
has "received inquiries" on a number of the schools it contracted
to repair. He says Bechtel has directed its subcontractors to make repairs,
and is witholding 10 percent of the subcontractors' payment to ensure that
repairs will be made.
-
- But the United States Agency for International Development
(AID) is unapologetic about the state of the schools. An official spokesperson
tells us: "If you are going to do a slam article that complains that
the paint is peeling on a school that we didn't fix, I don't see why I
should talk to you. I don't even know that you went to schools that were
fixed by AID - 26 of the 52 schools that have submitted complaints were
not even part of our contract." We assure her that we only visited
schools that were listed by Bechtel, showing her Bechtel's own list. She
acknowledged the list with bad grace, clearly rattled by numerous news
reports of the failure of the school repair program which officials had
hoped would bring them much-needed positive publicity.
-
- MAKING A KILLING
-
- To its credit, Bechtel is one of the few companies that
has made extensive use of local contractors and holds regular meetings
to explain how to get work from them. It is also the most accessible to
the international press, being the only company to maintain offices at
the Baghdad convention center where the U.S. military holds trainings,
meetings, and press conferences for the outside world.
-
- However, the company is not as accessible to ordinary
Iraqis. Getting to Bechtel's offices isn't easy. It takes half an hour
on a good day to get through three body searches and a maze of barbed wire,
sandbags, solid concrete road blocks, and soldiers, designed to keep out
suicide bombers.
-
- Visitors to the basement of the convention center where
Bechtel keeps its offices might meet Maniram Gurung outside the United
States consul's office. Standing in front of photographs of Bush, Cheney,
and Powell, Gurung watches American soldiers, Iraqi government officials,
and contractors hurry by in the business of nation-building.
-
- For the retired Gurkha rifleman from Kathmandu, Nepal,
this guard duty is yet another boring but well-paying job, allowing him
to send $1,300 home to his family, a small fortune in his country. It's
not as much as he used to earn when he had to retire from the British Army
in 1990 at $2,500 a month, but it helps pay the bills. And there are some
advantages - this job is only for six months whereas in the British Army
he could only go home from his rotation in exotic locales like Brunei and
Hong Kong once every three years.
-
- But Gurung is not a member of the coalition forces: his
red badge identifies him as an employee of a private security company called
Global Risk. Some 500 Gurkhas and 500 Fijians make up the bulk of this
British company's armed staff, and as a security force for the CPA, they
face just as much danger and resentment as the soldiers. In early August
a Gurkha was killed by a bomb in Basra. Today they are confined to their
barracks at night, eight men to a trailer home, and food is strictly "English"
(a euphemism to mean Western food), provided by Kellogg, Brown & Root
sweatshop cooks from India whose base pay is just three dollars a day.
-
- Why all this security? Almost every day a U.S. soldier
is killed by the well-hidden but determined Iraqi resistance, and in recent
weeks they have started to target the companies that are profiting from
the occupation.
-
- This summer, a Bechtel engineer and four guards were
attacked by a crowd that hurled giant chunks of ripped-up concrete at the
business executives in the SUV they were traveling in, shattering most
of the windows.
-
- Today U.S. and European businessmen travel with caution
in what has become the unofficial transportation of the war profiteers:
shiny new white GMC Suburbans. Often their vehicles are flanked by two
other SUVs filled with gun-toting private security guards.
-
- While guards like Gurung make a relatively princely salary
by Middle Eastern standards, their Iraqi counterparts make far less. Mohammed
al-Husany, the ever cheerful head of security at the Palestine Hotel's
outer barricade, tells us that he makes just 100 dollars a month, not enough
to support his wife and two kids. "I want a job with the American
companies. I have a second degree black belt in karate and I know how to
fire every kind of weapon. AK-47s, M-16s, all of them. But my friends who
work for Halliburton's security make $400 dollars a month and the American
security guards even more," he confides to us.
-
- Not that the security and barricades have prevented all
Iraqi resisters. Did we see the bombing of the hotel last week?, he asks.
"The rockets went just one meter over my head," he says, imitating
the sound of the missile. "They fired it from a donkey cart. Now no
more animals allowed around here."
-
- But as far as we have been able to determine, most Iraqi
security guards rarely make over $100 a month for five 12-hour shifts a
week. Their employers, however (and there are dozens of Western security
companies in Iraq today), make a killing selling their services. A contract
seen by Southern Exposure from Group 4 Falck, a British security company,
offered the CPA two armed guards 24 hour a day for any building for $6106
a month, of which the Iraqi guards' salaries amounted to just 10 percent
of the costs.
-
- WAR PROFITEERING ?
-
- The three employees of Kellogg, Brown, and Root (a Halliburton
subsidiary), standing at the base of a stairwell at the convention center
chatting on their tea break, are excited. Khaled Ali tries several times
to pronounce the word "congratulations" but fails. Exasperated,
he turns to me to ask if there is a better word. I suggest slapping his
friend on the back and saying: Good job! Well done! But he shakes his head
violently. "No, I cannot say that - Mr. Lewis is an American, my boss.
I must say something more polite."
-
- We start talking. Khaled Ali is an engineer in charge
of construction at the convention center, Sabah Adel Mostafa is an interpreter,
and Daoud Farrod is a supervisor. Farrod is older but the first two are
in their late twenties. They are friends and live in the same neighborhood.
Every morning Halliburton sends a car to pick them up and bring them to
work at 8 a.m. and take them back at 4 p.m.
-
- They are enthusiastic about their work. "It's my
first job. I was not able to practice my English before. And the [previous
government] pay was just $10 a month," Mostafa tells me. Ali says
it his first job, too. "And you are in charge of all the construction
here," I ask. He nods proudly, beaming when we say "Congratulations!"
Mostafa earns $200 a month, right in the middle of the typical pay scale
for Halliburton's Iraqi workers, which ranges from $100 to $300 a month.
By comparison, Houston engineers can make as much as $900 a day.
-
- If the local staff gets paid so little, the question
is what happens to the rest of the money? To date, Halliburton has made
over $2.2 billion from the war in Iraq but, unlike Bechtel, most of this
money is not for fixing Iraq's destroyed and crumbling infrastructure.
Some 42% is spent on combating oil fires and fixing oil pipelines, 48%
is for supporting the needs of the occupying army (such as housing and
transportation for troops), leaving just 10% for meeting community needs
in Iraq.
-
- Breaking down the numbers reveals some startling details:
Halliburton has spent $40 million to support the unsuccessful search for
weapons of mass destruction - enough to support 6,600 families in Iraq
for a year (at $500 a month, the number cited by many Iraqis as necessary
for a decent standard of living).
-
- Other numbers are just as startling - Halliburton's net
profit for the second quarter of 2003 was $26 million, which contrasts
markedly with the company's net loss of $498 million in the same quarter
of 2002. Most of its new income is from the contracts in Iraq." Iraq
was a very nice boost" for the company, an analyst told The Wall Street
Journal.
-
- Easily the most controversial contract that the company
has won in Iraq is for fuel transportation. The importing of gasoline has
proved to be among the most costly elements of the reconstruction effort.
Although Iraq has some of the biggest oil reserves in the world, production
has ground to a halt because of pipeline sabotage, power failures, and
an outdated infrastructure affected by more than twelve years of United
Nations sanctions.
-
- The United States has been paying Halliburton an average
of $2.64 a gallon to import gasoline to Iraq from Kuwait, more than twice
what others are paying to truck in Kuwaiti fuel, government documents show.
In some cases Halliburton has even charged the government as much as $3.09
a gallon. Wendy Hall, a Halliburton spokesperson, defends the company's
astronomical charges for gasoline. "It is expensive to purchase, ship,
and deliver fuel into a wartime situation, especially when you are limited
by short-duration contracting."
-
- The prices Halliburton is charging for gasoline were
first uncovered by two Democrats in Congress, John Dingell of Michigan
and Henry Waxman of California. Documents they recently obtained from the
Army Corps of Engineers show that Halliburton gets 26 cents a gallon for
its overhead and fee, but this does not include the company's profits,
which will be determined at the end of the contract and may be as high
as 9 percent, depending on the Army's evaluation of the services provided.
-
- "I have never seen anything like this in my life,"
said Phil Verleger, a California oil economist and the president of the
consulting firm PK Verleger told the New York Times. "That's a monopoly
premium - that's the only term to describe it. Every logistical firm or
oil subsidiary in the United States and Europe would salivate to have that
sort of contract."
-
- Meanwhile, Iraq's state oil company, SOMO, pays 96 cents
a gallon to bring in gasoline. Both SOMO and Halliburton's subcontractor
deliver gasoline to the same depots in Iraq and often use the same military
escorts.
-
- The good news about Hallliburton's overcharging is that
these prices have not been passed on to Iraqi consumers directly. The price
of fuel sold in Iraq , set by the government, is 5 cents to 15 cents a
gallon, the same price as before the war.
-
- Yet these numbers are cold comfort to most Baghdad citizens,
because there is very little gasoline available for sale. One must spend
at least four hours to buy gas at the pump and often much longer.
-
- The bad news for Iraqis is that the money for Halliburton's
gas contract has come principally from the United Nations oil-for-food
program (now called the Iraq Development Fund), money that should rightfully
be spent on food and basic necessities for the Iraqi people rather than
paid to Halliburton for expensive oil imports, though some of the costs
have been borne by American taxpayers.
-
- An internal Pentagon audit has confirmed the overcharging,
indicating that Halliburton billed the government an extra $61 million
for gasoline (and also attempted to overcharge by $67 million for dining
services for the military).
-
- On our way back from our interviews, we pass yet another
line for gasoline: it stretches around the block and all the way across
the bridge over the river. We decide to chat with the men waiting in line.
We are quickly surrounded by angry people.
-
- "We were a rich country - now our very wealth has
been stolen by the Americans," says one. "Under Saddam we never
had to wait in line for benzene [the local word for gas or petrol], now
we must spend half a day and then sometimes they run out," says another.
The popular theory is that Americans are re-selling the high quality Iraqi
gasoline to other countries or keeping it for themselves. "They sell
us Turkish or Kuwaiti or Saudi oil. This is bad for our engines and creates
more pollution." One little boy joins the fray: "George Bush
Ali Baba, George Bush Ali Baba." (Ali Baba is the popular local term
for thief, popularized by the U.S. military to refer to looters. Now, according
to the New York Times, Iraqis use the term to refer to occupation forces.)
-
- Just a block away from the gas station, it is possible
to buy black market gasoline for one dollar a gallon - ten times more than
at the pump. We decide to buy from the black marketers, and ask the man
why he chooses to sell the money at such a high mark-up. "Listen,
I used to be an electrical engineer. Now I have no job. Who will feed my
wife and three children ?" he asks.
-
- As we leave the neighborhood we meet yet another military
patrol, which looks like a movie set for a Vietnam war movie transplanted
to the 21st century. Three Humvees with soldiers covered from head to toe
in camouflage and full face masks, each facing a different direction, crawl
along the road behind a tank. These guys have their fingers on the trigger;
you can almost see them scowl.
-
- Yet despite all this private security and the tens of
thousands of troops, life for ordinary Iraqis has unquestionably become
far worse: two blocks from our hotel, a man was shot in the head and lay
bleeding. A passerby discovered him and took him to the police station,
but the police refused to investigate.
-
- "What has happened to Iraq ? We are in a state of
chaos, this is a complete breakdown of our civilization. The other day
I was called in to have my passport stamped by the occupation authorities.
Me, an Iraqi citizen, I have to have my existence verified by these Americans.
And I have to bribe the man to get an interview. When I told the Americans
that I had to pay a bribe, they told me I shouldn't have and I said: well,
if you paid him a decent salary, maybe he wouldn't have to ask for a bribe.
But no, they pay people the same as under Saddam."
-
- PROPAGANDA FOR THE PEOPLE
-
- Dressed in regulation camouflage khakis, the G.I. from
the First Armored Battalion was causing a minor traffic jam by handing
out newspapers in the middle of traffic at the Sahar Antar (Sahar means
roundabout) in the Al Adamiyah neighborhood. His fellow soldiers watched
warily from their Humvee and Bradley convoy parked to the side, just in
case anyone decided to take a potshot at their colleague.
-
- We gasped as we flipped open our copy of Baghdad Now,
a bilingual newspaper issued by the military. Two headlines read "Operation
Iron Hammer Nets Terrorists" and "Iraqi-American Friendship on
the rise." Pratap had a flashback to Cold War propaganda in India
20 years ago ("Soviet-Indian Friendship on the rise"). Similarly,
a page five article on the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the dedication of
a renovated engineering building reminded us of the filler articles one
might see in newspapers from the former Soviet bloc.
-
- On the front cover was a photo of an Iraqi Civil Defense
Corps (ICDC) soldier toting an M-16 and looking as menacing as possible.
A page six article headlined "Iraq's New Defenders" started,
"In addition to the new national army being formed to defend Iraq's
borders in the post-Saddam worked, the ICDC has been created to aid in
policing the nation's cities." No mention of poor salaries here, although
more than half of the new recruits to the Iraqi army have already quit
because of low pay.
-
- Writes Colonel Brad May of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment,
"Iraq is for the people of Iraq. Everyday I see more and more signs
that this statement is true. The Iraqi people are well on their way to
leading their country into the future: children walk to school, buses crowd
the street carrying people to their destinations, and street vendors compete
against each other for your business."
-
- We show this paper to Dr. Aziz, who runs a small printing
business just outside the Sheraton hotel in Baghdad. He glances at it and
grimaces. He explains that the American government should stop telling
the Iraqi people how lucky they are and start fixing the problems, otherwise
even their supporters are going to start protesting. "Please tell
your readers that we are a civilized people and we cannot tolerate this
any more."
-
- - Pratap Chatterjee is managing editor for Corpwatch
(www.corpwatch.org ) in Oakland, California and Herbert Docena works with
the Iraq International Occupation Watch Center (www.occupationwatch.org)
and Focus on the Global South (www.focusweb.org). This piece was made possible
in part due to support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the
Fund for Constitutional Government, and the Bob Hall Investigative Action
Fund.
-
- - Southern Exposure magazine is published quarterly by
the Institute for Southern Studies, a non-profit research and education
center. www.southernstudies.org
-
- http://www.alternatives.ca/article1100.html
|